On Better Prizes
Recently I have become more acquainted with the trappings of the ego…the promise of all things finite seems too good to be true. It is. The allure of status and wealth offers one the opportunity to conquer supposedly great fears. The fear of poverty. The fear of your name forgotten forever. Within these successes lies the trap. While it feels like you possess your titles and material resources, you’re the unwitting lessee of goods that fortune generously loaned you — terms undisclosed. So, should we consider status and wealth the best proxies for a good life?
I suppose that how you spend your attention right now, your only resource, determines largely the degree to which you’ve lived a good life. How do you allocate your attention during each moment experienced as this moment? To become aware of how you spend your attention, I think you need to develop (at least) two abilities: mindfulness and consequence appreciation.
Mindfulness is the ability to witness vividly the richness of the moment-to-moment experience you have: being here with the now as the here and the now. Indeed, the person who enjoys the full flavor of a grain of rice experiences levels of joy that a content Michelin-connoisseur could only dream of achieving. To fully experience joy, I think you must be aware of your capacity to witness it. Then, sit back and watch the show :)
People who understand consequences are the masters of cause and effect. Engineers understand physics well enough to apply it and collaborate with it, allowing us to build heaven-exploring tools. Doctors understand medicine, allowing us to interpret the mystical mechanics of our bodies. Poets understand linguistics, allowing us to communicate beautifully. Consider this: every discipline of understanding such as physics, medicine, and linguistics reflects an updated compilation of consequences in the field — a greatest hits album of sorts. Understanding consequences make your leap from if x happens to then y will happen a bit more accurate.
A genuine appreciation of consequences seems like the key to accepting, nay, embracing one’s fate — amor fati. How can you be at peace when you fight the forces of nature that molded you and will continue to shape you while you play your role in this cosmic dance? Like gravity explains why rocks fall, an individual’s neurobiology and external stimuli could explain why the person behaved in a certain way. Note: this is a gross oversimplification since many other factors affect behavior.
The capacity to plan and analyze depends on predicting yourself and the environment. Your brain orchestrates a complex system of processes to keep you alive. It helps you reflect on the past, see the future, and live now. However, living well requires you to be present or mindful. Mindfulness (specifically: the quality measure of being present) enables you to see yourself as a part of your environment, not apart from your environment.
Funny, would it be fair to suggest that your environment consists of your (mind)set and setting? After witnessing your relationship with your environment, you’ll notice you’re an organism-environment fundamentally. Wherever you are, please take a moment to marvel at the fact that you are identical with the universe, the greatest mystery of which I’m aware.
More to come soon…
First time reading? please check out the sailing manual for helpful guidance!
Originally published at https://mirror.xyz.
